POLICE GET SERIOUS ABOUT FACING BIAS

CHEVY CHASE, Md. -- In confronting racial bias, most police
departments lag so far behind America's other institutions, from
corporations to the military, that critics' periodic calls for change
often seem like futile rhetoric.

So if you're black and used to being hassled by cops for no good
reason, you can be excused for feeling a touch cynical now that
politicians -- including, most recently, President Clinton -- are
again making high-sounding pledges of police reform.

Yet something could actually happen this time: In the past few years
innovative tactics for changing police behavior have been tested
successfully by police in Oak Park, Ill., Prince George's County, Md.,
and San Diego, for example. The question is how many other departments
will pick them up.

After complaints of racially motivated police stops in Oak Park, an
integrated town that borders the impoverished West Side of Chicago,
Chief Joseph Mendrick put his entire 118-member force through
diversity training, instituted community policing and transformed an
overwhelmingly white department into one with 23 blacks and five Hispanics.

To preclude officers' taping racist or sexist caricatures on the
stationhouse walls, Mendrick barred any postings except official
notices. He also suspended an officer who used a racial epithet on the
phone, and dismissed another for scrawling racist graffiti in the bathroom.

The theory behind Mendrick's efforts is that punishing small
infractions will head off larger ones. (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New
York might find him a kindred spirit, in a sense.) And in fact,
citizen complaints in Oak Park have dropped precipitously.

Traffic stops and drug searches aimed mostly at blacks have recently
brought criticism of state police in New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland
and elsewhere. Prince George's County tries to deter racially biased
practices with an early warning system that alerts supervisors when an
officer receives a certain number of citizen complaints.

"A supervisor calls him in and says, 'What's going on?"' says Bob
Stewart, executive director of the National Organization of Black Law
Enforcement Executives. "It seems to be very effective. The number of
traffic stops is up, the number of complaints down."

Another deterrent, adopted by the San Diego police department, is
simply to keep statistical records of the race of every motorist who
is pulled over. (Videotaping the stops automatically from patrol cars
is also gaining support from professional police associations as a way
of reining in police misconduct.)

The complicated years since the civil rights movement have taught
several basic lessons about fighting institutional bias. First,
prejudice is often subtle and invisible -- unless you're the target.
But few police departments do what the military does: Repeatedly
survey members about the racial climate in their units, then make
corrections and survey again.

Second, racial integration is necessary but not sufficient. Putting
blacks, Hispanics, Asians and whites together on police forces -- or
in universities, offices, factories and Army battalions -- doesn't
magically eliminate bigotry. Integration (or "diversity") needs to be
managed attentively, or it fails. Few police departments do such management.

Third, as segregationists used to say: Attitudes cannot be legislated.
Nor should they be in a free society. But behavior can be, and many
organizations set effective standards. The racist jokes that some
police officers feel free to tell around the precinct house would ruin
the career of an Army officer or a newspaper editor.

Clinton wants to expand ethics and integrity training by giving $20
million more to the Justice Department's 30 Regional Community
Policing Institutes, but it is not clear how much this instruction
would focus on racial matters.

Those institutes might look at the military's respected Defense Equal
Opportunity Management Institute, which puts senior sergeants and
career officers through lengthy courses so that they can go into the
field and advise commanders on racial matters. The methods have been
developed. The models are there.

If police departments used a similar approach to train veteran
officers as full-time advisers, there's little doubt that life on the
street would be more just for all of us.